God Soul Mind Brain

“Aren’t I looking directly at you?”

    Patient: “The black dots in the white circles are called eyes.” (Because of the damage to STP, Bill has lost the ability to detect the direction of someone’s gaze.)

    Doctor: “Some things are conscious and some things are not. Is the chair aware of you?”

    Patient: “The chair is under me.”

    Doctor: “Do you know what awareness means?” Patient: “It’s in Webster’s dictionary.”

    Doctor: “But surely you experience qualia. Does the color red feel different to you than green?”

    Patient: “That shirt is red. That plant is green.”

    Is Bill conscious or not? Most people would probably perceive him as conscious, because we are constructed to perceive consciousness in objects that act and talk. If some people have such over-sensitive perceptual machinery that they perceive consciousness in a house-plant, then most of us would probably perceive consciousness in Bill, who is considerably more mentally lively than a plant. But Bill would be unable to perceive consciousness in himself or in others, or even to understand the concept of consciousness, because his perceptual machinery that constructs that model is gone.

    Is Bill an automaton? Philosophy has adopted the idea of an automaton, a hypothetical thing that looks and acts like a person but lacks an inner consciousness. If you meet an automaton, you may require a little time, a conversation or a careful study, before you realize that its soul is empty. Perhaps it is so cleverly put together that you never discover it lacks consciousness. When we try to imagine an automaton, what it might be like, what properties it may have and may lack, we tend to focus on features like biological motion (an automaton should move stiffly and mechanically), the direction of gaze (an automaton should have trouble shifting its gaze in a fluid fashion), and facial expressions (an automaton should have a stiff, unemotional face). These are the features we normally use to construct a model of someone else’s mind. Area STP is filled with cells that detect biological motion, gaze, and facial expression. Therefore, when we try to imagine an automaton, we tend to imagine something that lacks those features. It is not surprising or coincidental that the same deficiencies are typical of Hollywood robots. The Terminator moves stiffly instead of biologically, shifts its gaze in a mechanical manner that often includes turning the entire head, and has an immobile face. These properties are of course meant to connote a machine that lacks a normal human soul.

    In Bill’s case, perhaps the loss of his social machinery causes some impairment in biological motion, in eye contact, or in facial nuance. Perhaps he does seem a bit stiff or robotic. Perhaps not. But whether he seems to us like an automaton misses the point. Bill has a much deeper problem. He is unable to perceive consciousness in himself or in others. I am not certain that he is really an automaton in the traditional sense. If you could surgically excise consciousness from a person, the person would probably act more like Bill (unable to understand the concept of awareness) than like the traditional, hypothetical automaton (stiff, robotic and unemotional).

    Autism is considered to be at least partly a disability of the normal social machinery. Does that mean that autistic people have no consciousness? I think the answer is clear. Autistic people are conscious. Autism is not all-or-nothing. Probably nobody, not even the most severely autistic patient, is totally lacking social perception. Few people if any would measure up to the pure case of Bill, the hypothetical patient described above. (Occasionally people who know me claim that I’m somewhere on the autistic spectrum, which may or may not be a valid observation. In any case, I think I’m conscious.)

    For my own money, on the evidence so far, I would guess that STP and TPJ are critical players in building perceptual models of other minds, part of the circuitry that perceives awareness, intentionality, and consciousness in others and in ourselves, part of the brain system that has the expertise to report being conscious when asked. Losing these brain areas would probably cause a major impairment in all of those functions. But I think STP and TPJ are likely to work in tandem with far-flung areas around the brain. My guess is that the consciousness circuitry does not have a hard border, but grades off in a fuzzy